Dr. C. Hendricks

Christina Hendricks is a Sr. Instructor in Philosophy and Arts One at the University of British Columbia. She has been interested in EPI for years and has read a couple of books on the topic but hasn’t (yet!) gotten involved any more than that. She is hoping to work closely with the EPI community here to help make connections with the Philosophy department at UBC. She is interested in thinking about how to incorporate EPI work into her undergraduate philosophy courses, and is also looking into areas of research she’d like to do into EPI. Finally, as a mother of a child born in 2007, Christina is excited to be learning how to engage her son in philosophical inquiry at home!

Reflections on my own teaching of philosophy courses to undergraduates at the University of British Columbia (and also an interdisciplinary course called Arts One), including issues I’m facing, things I’ve tried, etc.

Summaries and commentaries on SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) articles that are related to issues I’m having or research projects that I am myself working on

Information and sites about open access scholarly publishing and open education

Various other things, such as calls for papers, issues in the philosophy profession generally, and more

Research Interests

After focusing in graduate school on evaluating the views of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault on the political role of intellectuals, I have so far done most of my research on the work of Michel Foucault, largely in the area of the political role of intellectuals. I have also studied Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, especially those from 1980-1984, where he engages in a historical analysis of the relationships between philosophical practice, truth-telling (parrhesia), and personal, social, and political transformation. I plan to write more about parrhesia in the near future.

Of late, however, I have focused my research more on the area of teaching and learning, and especially on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). I have been working to make my teaching more scholarly (basing my practice in data from the literature on teaching and learning as much as possible), and am planning some research projects of my own to collect data and contribute to the literature myself. I am particularly interested in research on learning communities (Arts One is an example of a learning community), how to help students improve their writing (including how best to organize and implement peer feedback activities, what sort of feedback from the professor tends to be most effective, how to ensure that that feedback is actually used in later work, and the efficacy of scaffolding writing assignments), and possible causes and remedies for the gender imbalance in philosophy in North America (and possibly elsewhere…I just am not as familiar with elsewhere).

I try to do posts on various scholarly articles on these and other topics in my blog on teaching philosophy, You’re the Teacher. When I’m teaching, my blogging rate goes way down, but during breaks between terms I try to keep up with posting regularly.

Selected Publications

“Prophecy and Parrêsia: Foucauldian Critique and the Political Role of Intellectuals” in Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Ruth Sonderegger and Karin de Boer, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

“Foucault’s Kantian Critique: Philosophy and the Present”, Philosophy and Social Criticism Vol. 34, No. 4 (May 2008): 357-382. A pre-publication version of this paper can be found here: Hendricks-FoucaultKantCritique-WebVersion.pdf

“Does Teaching the Philosophy of Happiness Make One’s Students Happier?” Joint presentation with Dr. Jennifer Mulnix of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, at the group meeting of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, San Diego, California, April 2011

“A Philosophy of One’s Own,” workshop for the biannual meeting of the American Association for Philosophy Teachers, Conway/Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, July 2010

“Authority and Autonomy in Descartes’ Discourse on Method,” Annual meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, New Brunswick, New Jersey, April 2010. A copy of this presentation can be found here: ACTC2010-WebVersion.pdf